"If I were a bird, I would fly about the earth, seeking the successive autumns."

- George Eliot

Our ongoing autumn and harvest explorations bring joy and discovery, as each day we find out together what affordances are provided by the changes in our outdoor environment, coupled with the opportunities offered by teachers in the prepared environment. As we shared during Curriculum Night, we integrate all of the Learning Links into our thematic curriculum, through different projects and activities.  As we have gotten to know your children, we are able to offer them choices that speak to their passions as well as their developmental needs. For example, when we observe some children seeking movement and heavy work, we can offer choices such as hammering pumpkins, raking leaves, and collecting walnuts in wheelbarrows. Sometimes these options are chosen by children, through self-directed work and motivated by personal interests, while other times, we ensure that every child has a chance to participate in a specific type of work. This week, we are sharing a mix of open-ended as well as teacher-directed activities through which children have been exploring the harvest theme. We are looking forward to our culminating event of Harvest Feast next week to celebrate all the learning and playing that we have done this season! 

Apple Taste Test 

We  took part in an apple “taste test,” as a way to familiarize ourselves with the way different apples can taste, practice comparing and contrasting, and develop descriptive vocabulary. This year, we tested three varieties of apples: Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Fuji. After each student tasted all three apples, they wrote their name or used their name stamp, with teacher support as needed, on a red, yellow, or green circle to place on our chart to track our class preferences. Earlier in the month, we created this paper by rolling black walnuts in a wading pool, using teamwork to move them around. Children also helped to cut out the circles, carefully driving on the marked "road" with their scissors. After everyone tasted and voted, we tallied the votes and discovered that Red Delicious was tied with Granny Smith, with five votes each and Fuji was in first place with twelve votes.    

Gruffalo Crumble 

One of the books that children continued to request day after day was The Gruffalo, a story of a little mouse who avoids being eaten by bigger forest creatures, warning them that the Gruffalo is on its way to them. When, to the mouse's surprise, the Gruffalo actually shows up, the mouse tricks the Gruffalo into thinking that everyone is the forest is scared of mouse! When the mouse declares that his favorite treat is "gruffalo crumble," the Gruffalo quickly flees! Luckily, our local farm Meadowbrook had plenty of "gruffalo" (apples 😉) in stock, so we could make our very own gruffalo crumble. We decided to make enough to share with the Neighborhood, which required chopping seven pounds of apples. Everyone pitched in to help with an apple or two, and then a small group of children helped to add the other ingredients. We followed our recipe, learning how to safely and accurately use our measuring and mixing tools. The next morning, we cooked our gruffalo crumble and shared it with our friends during choice time. The verdict: it was delicious!  

Making Apple Sauce 

Bringing boxes of apples back to school from Meadowbrook farm inspired apple play as well as apple cooking. We used the apples to make applesauce for Harvest Feast, doing all the jobs of washing, peeling, chopping, mashing, and milling the apples. We had to work together while taking turns with all the different tools. We used a combination of fine and large motor skills, such as cranking the apple peeler or dicing with the chopper. The milling of the cooked apples was of great interest, as children curiously watched to see how the mechanics worked. The children were eager to help and proud of their contribution to our shared Feast. Using real tools and being able to do “real work” in the process of creating a dish that they are able to eat and enjoy as well as share with their peers and older friends helps foster a sense of pride and community.  Harvest Feast is a school-wide celebration of the garden work we have done all year long, a connection between this year and the last and the next, and a time to gather in gratitude with our community. We did sneak a little taste of the applesauce just to make sure it was up to our standards!  

Exploring the Three Sisters: Squash & Corn

A hammer, colorful golf tees, and a pumpkin are all you need for a fun, engaging activity that activates the brain and body, working muscles large and small. The open-ended nature of the materials as well as the focus required engages children as they interact with the activity in their own unique way. Tapping, twisting, pinching, holding, and pulling are all foundational fine motor skills that are connected directly to fostering writing at this age as well as hand-eye coordination. After we were finished with the pumpkins, we fed the scraps to the chickens. We also made the chickens a special pumpkin, where we filled small holes with grubs, and the chickens took the rest of the carving from there, creating their very own jack-o-lantern!

Gourds were also presented to the children, along with materials including rubber bands, magnifying glasses, scales, and unifix cubes. Stretching  and manipulating rubber bands of all different sizes and resistance over and around gourds also lends itself to exercising those fine motor muscles that children use daily.  This strengthens the muscles in the hands as well as developing hand-eye coordination.  Children practice coordination, dexterity, and precision when placing the rubber bands. Children were also able to examine the gourds closely, comparing and contrasting their size, shape, and weight, using the tools available to them.

Another choice was corn cobs, as children worked with tweezers to remove kernels from the cob to add to our sensory table. This activity has similar benefits to the two shared above; having multiple opportunities to practice related skills provides children with the choices of when and how they want to engage, ensuring that everyone finds an entry point that feels comfortable for them. After we finished removing the kernels, the kernels were mixed with different open-ended materials, like scoopers and tubes, and suddenly we had our very own potion kitchen, as the children stirred "around and around in the pot."   

Pumpkin Seeds

After scooping out the guts of our pumpkins last week, we sorted through the insides to separate all the seeds. We were interested in counting how many seeds there were. We made some predictions, with guesses raning from 15 to a million! Using ten frames, we started to count out the pumpkin seeds. After filling 10 ten frames (100 seeds!), we saw that there were still so many left in the container that we wouldn't be able to count them all. We settled on a number "more than one hundred." Later that day, evan and Samantha built a fire in the fire pit and we added salt and oil to our pumpkin seeds for roasting. We enjoyed them at lunch time, with many children asking for second and third helpings. One child commented, "it tastes like popcorn!" which many other children agreed with. Exploring the pumpkin seeds was an experience involving so many senses, from touching the seeds to listening to them cook to the final tasting. Hopefully we'll get to plant some pumpkin seeds as well when the Three Sisters garden is ready in the spring. 

Leaf Person Book

Watching the leaves as they changed colors inspired leaf-based projects, including necklaces, collections, and our “Leaf People” stories. Inspired by Lois Ehlert’s Leaf Man, we created our own leaf people to star in a Ducklings original book, written and illustrated by us! This project involved multiple steps and required sustained attention over many days. First, each child decorated a blank piece of contact paper with leaves and other various loose parts. Then, they decided where their leaf person was going and what they were doing. This step was scaffolded to each child’s ability, whether they dictated the words or copied and/or traced some or all of the words themselves. Finally, they drew a picture to go with their words and added a mini version of their leaf person to the scene.  

With Harvest Comes Math!

Harvest season provides us with so many opportunities to observe, count, estimate and compute amounts. We bought a medium size pumpkin, and had the kids hold it, feel how heavy it was, and then estimate how many seeds might be inside it! The estimations ranged from 12 to 1,000,000, with an average of about 200 seeds. That’s when the book “How Much is a Million” was useful. One of the ways the book showed 1,000,000 is to illustrate tiny stars lined up in rows, 7 whole pages of stars was only 100,000. So it would take 70 pages to have 1,000,000 dot-sized stars. Could 1,000,000 seeds fit inside the small pumpkin? During Choice Time we opened up our pumpkin and scooped out all the seeds, using 100’s charts to help us figure out how many seeds were actually inside! We counted 607 seeds inside our pumpkin! Teamwork, communication and mathematical brain power was needed from us all to figure out this big number!

Counting our many pumpkin seeds!

The children harvested what corn they could in our garden at school. After a very dry summer, it wasn’t a big haul. But we bought flint corn from Meadowbrook Farm to show them the beautiful variety of colors. They touched it and wondered if it was even real! They asked if it was edible. It is, but the kernels have to be ground and cooked, you can’t eat it off the cob like sweet corn. Someone said the corn kernels look painted. We’re learning more about corn, its history, the different ways to grow it, its life cycle and the different parts of the corn plant. Then the kids will draw and label a picture of corn themselves. We also did some estimation work and thought about how many kernels can be on one ear of corn. Most guesses were in the lower hundreds, even from teachers, but we figured out that the cob we were working with held 469 kernels! Isn’t that amazing! 

Using 100's charts to help us count how many kernels were on our corn cob!

Harvest Feast Prep

In getting ready for our annual Harvest Feast, the Grasshoppers, Honeybees, and Beetles have been busy since September! They dug for potatoes, weighed them in groups of 2 pounds and added them together. They helped to peel and chop apples to be used in making a dessert for the whole school! Also, all Randolph students helped to press apples into cider using Eric Fyfe’s (Annie and Frankie’s dad) wondrous bicycle press. Their hard work yielded ten gallons of sweet cider!

Speaking of dessert for everyone, we have to figure out how many times we would need to double the recipe for apple cake to make enough for 100 people. Also, we showed them a 13x9 inch pan and we had to figure out how to cut the cake to maximize the number of pieces. Should we cut it into 16? 24? There will be a lot of computing next week!

Traditionally, the job of the Upstairs Neighborhood is to set the tables for Harvest Feast. This entails counting and carrying to the back field all the plates, spoons, and forks for approximately 100 people!

Harvesting Color and Prepping For Harvest Feast

While we did get a chance to try out a drop spindle with some protein fiber, we didn’t spin enough of our own yarn in time for dyeing. Instead we used some lovely store-bought, undyed wool and cotton yarns. The yarn needed to be prepared for the dyeing process. First, the Hummingbirds took turns using a special tool called an umbrella swift (we nicknamed it Papa Jim Swift and put googly eyes on it, that’s just how those silly Hummingbirds are) to make hanks of yarn, or “yarn donuts” as one student named them. The children learned that hanking the yarn helps to increase the surface area and keep the yarn from getting tangled during the dyeing process. When not using the umbrella swift, children worked either in pairs or independently to make hanks using their hands outstretched or around their arm, like winding rope. In total they made almost seventy hanks of yarn! 

It was time to give the yarn a special bath to clear away any oils or debris that would interfere with the dye penetrating the fibers. This part of the process is called scouring. Once our yarn was nice and clean from scouring, it was ready for mordant. The children learned that the word mordant comes from a Latin word that means “to bite” and is a chemical put on fibers that helps to attach and hold dye pigments to the fibers. Small groups of children worked together using a precise digital kitchen scale to find out how many grams of yarn we had hanked and scoured.  They passed the yarn and information about how much it weighed to another team of children who worked carefully with Renée, wearing protective equipment (gloves, goggles and masks), to measure the proper amount of Aluminum Sulfate and water for the weight of fiber we now knew we had. Aluminum Sulfate is a metal salt commonly used by natural dyers as a mordant. It’s perfectly safe, but the powered version that we used can irritate the eyes and lungs if it gets in the air, hence the PPE and open air setting. Our hanks of yarn soaked in the mordant bath and were finally ready for dyeing the next day.

The children were grouped by interest into different dye teams: Marigold, Black Walnut, Acorn Cap, and Goldenrod. Later we added a team for Pokeberry and a team for creating a rust bath from vinegar, water and a piece of rusty metal (again proper safety precautions were taken when handling the rusty metal). Later the rust bath will be experimented with as a modifier to dip the dyed yarn into and potentially change the color. Each dye team had a different process they went through to extract the pigment from their dyestuff (the material being used to get the color) to create their dye bath. Some teams used heat extraction, simmering a pot of their dyestuff and water on an outdoor stove.  Others used a cold extraction process and let their dyestuff sit in water for a while until the desired color was achieved. Some teams chose to strain out the dyestuff before adding their yarn and some didn’t. The teams checked on their yarn as it soaked in their dye baths and made decisions together about whether they thought the yarn was ready to come out of the dye bath. One team even decided to see what would happen if they took half of their yarn out of the dye bath after a 24 hour soak and left the other half to soak for another 24 hours. Once the teams were happy with the outcome (or just done waiting!), they took their yarn out of the dye bath, rinsed out the excess pigment that didn’t adhere to the yarn, and hung it to dry. 

When not doing the actual work of the dye process, the Hummingbirds worked with their teams to create a Procedure Log that outlines their process and all the decisions they made together to get them from white yarn to colorful yarn. They used any notes they took as they dyed their yarn (like the weight of the yarn and dyestuff or how much water they used in their dye bath) and each other as resources to remember and record as exactly as they could what they did to achieve their color. Additionally, the dye teams created yarn sample tags that include a bit of the dyed yarn, the type of fiber (cellulose or protein), the mordant used, and the pigment source. The idea is that these procedure logs will be compiled together with the yarn sample tags they created in a dye journal, like real natural dyers keep, so we can reproduce the color another time if we choose to. 

Also like true natural dyers we’ve set up a light fastness test. The Hummingbirds learned that one of the most beautiful and interesting parts about dyeing with natural pigment sources is how these colors often change over time. We’re in the process of figuring out which of our dyes are most lightfast and which are more fugitive (meaning the color runs away). We used the same cards as we did for the dye journal yarn samples, but wrapped enough yarn to be able to cover half with black paper. We labeled them and placed them in the window. In a couple weeks we’ll check back in to see how the color has changed, if at all!

This Harvesting Color project has been so much fun and very involved. We appreciate you taking the time to read such a long update about it. It’s hard to believe that there’s still more to it! We’ve got some beautiful yarn we need to start making things out of and some research to do about what other fiber artists do with their yarn once it’s colorful. We’ll be sure to keep you posted!

But first, we have one more quick, but important piece of news for you: The Hummingbirds have chosen what we will be contributing to this year’s all-school Harvest Feast! Keep reading below to find out what we're making and how we decided!

Harvest Feast Menu Vote

We took last week’s election as an opportunity for the Hummingbirds to learn more about the election process through experiencing their own election. First, we needed our candidates. We started by thinking about past Harvest Feasts and what we’ve made and eaten before, plus the ingredients we know we have available to us this year. Using that as a jumping off point we brainstormed a list of foods we could make. We had quite a few candidates, so we needed to narrow down our choices with a first round of primary voting. Once we narrowed down our candidates, we held our official election. The Hummingbirds all sat in one area of the pavement and took turns going to the polling place (one of our picnic tables) to cast their vote by placing a stick in a paper cup labeled with the food choices, and walking to another area of the pavement after voting. Being an outdoor school, Mother Nature is always our teacher and in this instance she allowed us the opportunity to discuss voter interference when the wind blew over the paper cups scattering the votes already cast across the ground. We had to have a re-vote using stones instead of sticks and the breezes were much kinder to us during our second round of the final vote. Once all the votes were cast, but before counting them, we had a conversation about our feelings and reactions to the outcome. The children shared what feelings they might have if their choice won (happy, excited, proud) and if it lost (disappointed, angry, sad). They shared ideas about how to keep their reactions to winning or losing respectful of each other and ways they could manage any hard emotions that inevitably come up when things don’t go your way. They’re a remarkably thoughtful and empathic group of children, and once the votes were tallied in favor of mini corn muffins there were some cheers and some groans, but no major blowouts. 

The next day was another fruitful conversation that was meant for the children who didn’t vote for mini corn muffins. We posed the questions: What can we do if our choice didn’t get picked? Is that it? Will we never make the foods that didn’t get the most votes? The children agreed that at Randolph their voices are listened to and grownups are excited to help them make their ideas happen. So, maybe we can make one of the foods with fewer votes  on a “Foodie Friday” when we sometimes cook with the Upper Carriage House class over the campfire. Or, maybe we can make some food for just The Hummingbirds. Or, what if we end up making the mini corn muffins and still have time left to make another offering for Harvest Feast? Whatever happens, the Hummingbirds will handle it like champs!